Understanding Environmental Influence on Human Service Organizations

ABSTRACT

This study addresses the impact of the external environmental context of individual organizations on their internal structures and service configurations, as they attempted to adapt to a changing political economy, via an examination of a portion of the Georgia child welfare system's response to the introduction of the principles of managed care. Based, in part, on Hasenfeld's (1992) notion that institutional and political economy perspectives are the most important theoretical approaches to understanding external influence on the service delivery systems of human services organizations, the current study presents conceptual and analytical models, which also include network theory. A survey instrument was administered to assess Chief Executive Officers' and Managers' perceptions of the influence of external, political and economic, institutional, and network influences on their organizations' decisions to adopt managed care principles. Regression analyses on the index scores for these four variables provided limited support for political economy theory and network theory as significant predictors for the adoption of managed care principles.

Key Words:

• Organizational behavior
• managed care
• child welfare
• human services organizations